Salespeople spend time developing connections with leads, such as potential buyers of their product or service. Relationships with leads are difficult to cultivate when they begin as “cold calls,” i.e., when the salesperson has no connection to the lead. However, when a lead is introduced to the salesperson through a shared connection, such as a common friend, the likelihood of closing a deal increases significantly. Similar benefits of connecting to a person through a shared connection exist in social, education, and governmental arenas as well.
Increasingly, users are utilizing electronic forms of communication and on-line social networks to communicate with and connect to friends, colleagues, business partners, potential employees, and sales prospects. These forms of communication and connection often include publicly and privately available databases which are accessible to software applications. For example, they may be available via public application programming interfaces (APIs).
However, with the explosive growth of such communication and networks people receive more and more unsolicited communication from people they do not know. As such, it is often difficult to connect with a target person without an introduction or a shared connection.
It would be advantageous to provide systems and methods for leveraging various databases such as public APIs to monitor a user's connections over various forms of electronic communication and social networking, combine the information, make computations and comparisons regarding the information, and notify the user about valuable new personal connections associated therewith.